NFTs
Bored Apes now cost less than they did before the NFT craze began three years ago – DL News
- Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are down 90% from their all-time highs.
- BAYC’s derivatives collections also suffered similar reductions.
The price of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs has fallen to levels last seen at the start of the web3 boom three years ago.
NFT collection pieces now trade for less than 10 ETH – about $33,000 – for the first time since August 2021.
This represents a 90% drop from the all-time high of $350,000 in May 2022.
The drop comes amid a devastating rout of popular NFTs that has sparked a wave of market mania in 2021 and 2022.
Launched in April 2021, Bored Ape Yacht Club is a pool of 10,000 Ethereum NFTs representing cartoon monkey characters. They were initially sold for 0.08 Ether each, or about $150.
By August of that year, Bored Apes had risen to 9.5 Ether each, or $20,000.
The collection’s creator, Yuga Labs, expanded the franchise with two spin-off collections, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club.
These collections also suffered and fell 95% and 97% from their all-time highs, respectively.
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No demand
At its height in May 2022, the Bored Ape franchise seemed invincible.
Yuga Labs had just conducted its Otherside NFT minting, selling 55,000 land-based NFTs for its planned metaverse for $561 million, the largest NFT sale ever.
But in the months that followed, Yuga Labs failed.
Development of Otherside continued, but the once feverish appetite for the metaverse faded.
In 2023, Yuga Labs released Dookey Dash – an endless runner-style game much like Temple Run – but only for NFT holders. While this kept Bored Ape fans temporarily engaged, it wasn’t enough.
At the same time, the NFT marketplace Blur accelerated NFT trading by offering token incentives to traders. Lots of Bored Ape fans blamed the Blur by falling NFT prices because the token rewards traders incentivized to sell their NFTs at a loss.
Even as the crypto market recovers in 2024 due to spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund approvals, most NFTs – including Bored Apes – have failed to regain lost ground.
In April, Yuga Labs CEO Greg Solano announced a series of layoffs, telling company employees that the Bored Apes Yacht Club collection had “lost its way” and was struggling with “labyrinthine corporate processes.”
An NFT bear market
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s poor performance is part of a broader NFT bear market.
At the height of the NFT bull market, Bitwise, an asset manager, launched a Blue-Chip NFT index fund that included Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, as well as several other high-value NFTs.
The fund registered 74% loss since its inception in December 2021.
Despite this, there are pockets of strength in the NFT market.
Milady Maker, a popular NFT collection launched in August 2021, it is trading near its all-time high.
Tim Craig is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Email him at tim@dlnews.com.